Rotating Internship for aspiring exotics surgeon

[Sophia682]

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Hi! I’m a 4th-year vet student planning to do a rotating internship next year. My long-term goal is a surgical residency, but I also have a huge passion for exotics. In an ideal world I’d eventually be able to combine the two and do exotics surgery, so I’m trying to find a rotating internship that will set me up well for surgery while still giving me some solid exotics exposure.

I externed at Ocean State in Rhode Island and really enjoyed it. I’m basically conditionally accepted into their rotating internship, and so would save me a lot of stress with the Match, I really like the location, I liked the hospital and people, and the contract seems pretty good. My main hesitation is that the exotics experience seems a little limited, especially when it comes to exotics surgery. In addition, I've heard some strong opinions about doing an academic internships, but I wouldn't really love to do one...

With this, I’m still considering going through the Match and looking at places like Red Bank, AMC, Colorado State, Tufts, Gulf Coast, etc., which might be a better fit for surgery and/or exotics.

Has anyone here done a rotating internship at any of these places, or somewhere else you think I should look at? I’d especially love to hear about any of these things:

• Typical hours/workload
• Surgery experience and mentorship
• How much exotics exposure you actually got, especially surgery
• Whether interns interested in surgery tended to move on to surgical internships/residencies
• Whether you think it’s worth doing the Match instead of taking a good private-practice internship offer early (I believe I have good LORs in SA ER, surgery, and exotics, research experience and a second name on a paper, a pretty high GPA, but not the highest rank. If that helps at all.)
• How important an academic rotating internship really is if I want to pursue surgery but ultimately see myself in private practice

Thanks for reading this all!

 

[WildZoo]

If your primary goal is surgery specialty I would focus more on that aspect for your rotating internship selection than on the exotics portion.

When you get to the stage of applying for surgery specialty internships and residencies, you will want to look at programs at hospitals that have a good exotics caseload, because that will help you get that experience - the exotics service in such places will usually maintain "ownership" of exotics cases but often surgeons will cut the more complicated things. But at the end of the day the exotics experience in your rotating internship is not likely to contribute much to whether or not you are seen as a good candidate for a surgery residency.

That is not to say it won't be valuable for you personally to get exotics experience, or that it won't help to be able to say "hey this is what I want to do" in your LORs and have a bit of exotics experience to back it up as you apply to places that expect their residents to cut exotics, just that if your path is surgery residency, which is a competitive path in itself, then that is where I would focus on setting yourself up for success.

I would sus out what residencies you ultimately want to apply for now, and use that to decide whether it is worth applying to academic internships. It is harder (not impossible, just harder) to go to private practice and then go back to academia than the other way around or to stay in one lane or the other.

SDN is also not generally the best place to get answers for the more specific questions you're asking about the programs, just because it's such a small sample size of the general vet med population that it's unlikely we have multiple people with experience with any particular internship program. And secondly because most people like to maintain some level of anonymity. I would recommend contacting the programs directly and asking to be put in contact with current/previous interns.

 

[supershorty]

But at the end of the day the exotics experience in your rotating internship is not likely to contribute much to whether or not you are seen as a good candidate for a surgery residency.

From the surgery resident perspective, I'd also ask yourself how much you really like ALL of surgery - ortho, soft tissue, neurosurgery, and surg onc. If your true interest and passion is more on the side of exotics, the process of obtaining and completing a surgery residency may not actually be what puts you toward the career you want most.

If you're really the most passionate about exotics type stuff, you may well get more useful experience pursuing that side of things vs aiming for a small animal surgery residency where the vast vast vast majority of things you'll cut are dogs and cats.

 

[WildZoo]

Yeah, I agree it will also be important to decide which thing is most valuable to you, and how much you're willing to do the other parts of either field while you're in training.

You can do surgery on exotic critters without being a surgeon. You can pursue exotics training and hone your surgery skills to focus on that, knowing that you will also likely spend a lot of time doing other areas of medicine. But you can also be a surgeon and choose to then focus your energy on exotics surgery specifically, if your dream is basically to be Avery Bennett. This is not something you're likely to be able to focus on quite as much during a surgery residency as shorty mentioned. Even in a place with plenty of exotics cases, your caseload as a surgery resident will be small in comparison to your caseload in domestics.

It's similar to a question I ask many vet students who want to pursue exotics/zoo/wildlife... Would you still be happy being a surgeon if exotics were by necessity a small portion of your caseload? Because there is no guarantee that you find a job after residency where you're able to make them your primary caseload, at least not immediately, and it certainly wouldn't be the case during internship(s) and residency on the surgery path.

 

[allygator13]

I'm not on the surgery side of things, but in all the hospitals I worked at throughout 4th year, two internships, and my residency, the exotics clinicians cut the vast majority of their own cases and would very occasionally ask surgery to be part of it if it was something particularly complex or a rare procedure. So as WildZoo and supershorty said, I'm not sure a small animal surgery residency is going to get you a ton of exotics surgery experience.